The Twitter Card: What is it? How do I get it? How can I use it? WIIFM?

What is a Twitter Card?

Twitter recently introduced a new feature to its already engaging-platform, the Twitter Card. Although the name suggests a static purpose and use (think: kitchen knife), the Twitter Card is a robust engagement tool that transcends its name; it’s more like a Swiss Army knife. Twitter Cards add a layer of previously-unseen engagement by giving the user the option of adding video, audio, images, direct app downloads, and product information to a tweet.

Audio messages are 500% more effective than email. Find out why and how to use them from expert guest Tim Sanders (@sanderssays) #corporate #podcasting https://t.co/bo38KRbFUx

— uStudio Inc. (@ustudio) September 5, 2018

 

We’re a video company, so for the purpose of this post, we’ll focus on how to use a Twitter Card to embed a video or audio player in your tweets and some of the great benefits you’ll enjoy from doing so.

Card Types

The first thing you need to know about your new Swiss Army Knife, i.e. your Twitter Card, is that each specific use is defined by a different type of “Card.” There are 7 types of Twitter Cards overall.

• Summary Card: Default Card, including a title, description, thumbnail, and Twitter account attribution.
• Summary Card with Large Image: Similar to a Summary Card, but with a prominently featured image.
• Photo Card: A Card with a photo only.
• Gallery Card: A Card highlighting a collection of four photos.
• App Card: A Card to detail a mobile app with direct download.
• Player Card: A Card to provide video/audio/media.
• Product Card: A Card optimized for product information.

The Player Card is the one that allows the user to embed a video player, or audio player. If you want to take advantage, read on to follow our journey from coding to frequent use.

 

How Do I Get a Twitter Card?

The Twitter Card tags are added before the closing tag of the head portion of your site and follow in the same vein as Facebook Open Graph tags. Already, you can find a variety of CMS plugins that enable the appropriate Twitter Card tags. If you don’t use a CMS, you’ll have to add code manually. Twitter offers a wide range of resources for developers to help you get started. Once the code portion is done, the next step is validation. Twitter offers a URL validator that sends your Twitter Card request to Twitter for approval. To date, there is not a standard wait time for approval. In our case, the approval came in less than a week.

Pro-Tip: To ensure success, make sure your domain has an SSL certificate before submitting your credentials to Twitter.

 

How Can I Use My Twitter Card?

Once you’re approved, the fun part begins!

With this card, you need metadata to specify card type (player), destination URL, content title, description, thumbnail image, player embed URL, and dimensions and your meta tags should look like this-

<meta name="twitter:card" content="player" />

<meta name="twitter:url" content="https://ustudio.com/blog/coming-sxsw-test-drive-interactive-player" />

<meta name="twitter:title" content="Coming to SXSW? Test Drive This Interactive Player." />

<meta name="twitter:description" content="uStudio Welcome to Austin SXSW 2015" />

<meta name="twitter:image:src" content="https://ustudio.com/sites/default/files/styles/blog_post__231_x_156_/public/Screen%20Shot%202015-02-13%20at%2011.32.28%20AM.png?itok=jDamCla2" />

<meta name="twitter:player" content="https://app.ustudio.com/embed/DvmNMppntqoB" />

<meta name="twitter:player:width" content="640" />

<meta name="twitter:player:height" content="361" />

 

At uStudio, we try to eat our own dogfood, as they say. So, our marketing team extended the basic Twitter Card capability by adding a customizable, interactive players. For example, in the Twitter post above, we embedded our lively Postcard Player, which plays 7 videos and offers a novel UX. Because the tagging is identical between a uStudio Custom Player and a single-video player, the interactivity of the custom player remains.

 

WIIFM: What’s In It For Me?

If you need to ask this question, we’re surprised you’ve read this far! But seriously, here are a few examples of new opportunities for better audience growth and engagement that are made possible by the Twitter Card.

First, you are offering your followers diversity within the medium. Now they can consume text, image, audio or video, which can make your Twitter stream stickier and increase time on your posts. For example, try posting a video review of a product next to a product listing, both are available Twitter Card option.

Second, consider the back-end of the spectrum. All this added tagging is crawlable data that increases SEO potential. You’ll be signaling very specific details about your content, and doing so benefits SEO without any added efforts.

Another important, less obvious, advantage comes via an increase of Twitter followers through content attribution. Often content curators will retweet without attribution to the original publisher and if the retweet gets yet another retweet, the original publisher is completely removed from the original content. Content curators are not the villains; lack of proper attribution is the consequence of limited character counts. The Twitter Card removes any question of attribution by cementing the content creator as part of the metadata, so the original source attribution travels with every retweet. This can net you new followers. Who knew a few lines of code could have such a deep impact?

Finally, get richer analytics about your Twitter traffic. If you want to know what happens after you post a Media Player Twitter Card, well, there’s a dashboard for that. As an account owner, you’ve always been able to see a snapshot of your account analytics. But once you implement Twitter Cards, you can access the Twitter Cards comparison section. This section of your analytics dashboard compares the top performing Twitter Cards and allows you to measure the results from different types of cards. This section also includes average click-through rates for other sites, allowing you to compare your results with those of other sites. With analytics in place, you can measure success, gain insights, and optimize your Twitter account for maximum engagement. For example, you can test if the inclusion of product video next to a product review increases conversions. Hint: it does!

Pro-Tip: You must implement the twitter site property in your card to accurately measure results.

 

Final Takeaways

Thus far, the Twitter Card has proven to be a wonderful asset to uStudio. As a video platform leader, we want to inspire people around all of the unique possibilities for using video throughout their business workflows. Before Twitter Cards, our Twitter followers needed to click on static links and navigate to our blog in order to see our latest custom player creations, product features, and capabilities. Although this content itself is engaging (we hope!), being forced to click through a static link is not. By adding an extra layer of rich-media to its platform, Twitter obviates the need to click through. Instead, it has unleashed an efficient and exciting way to connect users more deeply to brands within their feeds and, in our case, with video innovation. For that, we’re grateful. We suggest you go out and try it for yourself.